White people enjoy a deeply internalized, largely unconscious sense of
racial belonging in U.S. society27. This racial belonging is instilled
via the whiteness embedded in the culture at large. Everywhere we look,
we see our own racial image reflected back to us – in our heroes and
heroines, in standards of beauty, in our role-models and teachers, in
our textbooks and historical memory, in the media, in religious
iconography including the image of god himself, etc. In virtually any
situation or image deemed valuable in dominant society, whites belong.
Indeed, it is rare for most whites to experience a sense of not
belonging, and such experiences are usually very temporary, easily
avoidable situations. Racial belonging becomes deeply internalized and
taken for granted. In dominant society, interruption of racial belonging
is rare and thus destabilizing and frightening to whites.

Whites consistently choose and enjoy racial segregation. Living,
working, and playing in racial segregation is unremarkable as long as it
is not named or made explicitly intentional. For example, in many
anti-racist endeavors, a common exercise is to separate into caucus
groups by race in order to discuss issues specific to your racial group,
and without the pressure or stress of other groups’ presence. Generally,
people of color appreciate this opportunity for racial fellowship, but
white people typically become very uncomfortable, agitated and upset -
even though this temporary separation is in the service of addressing
racism. Responses include a disorienting sense of themselves as not just
people, but most particularly white people; a curious sense of loss
about this contrived and temporary separation which they don’t feel
about the real and on-going segregation in their daily lives; and
anxiety about not knowing what is going on in the groups of color. The
irony, again, is that most whites live in racial segregation every day,
and in fact, are the group most likely to intentionally choose that
segregation (albeit obscured in racially coded language such as seeking
“good schools” and “good neighborhoods”). This segregation is
unremarkable until it is named as deliberate – i.e. “We are now going to
separate by race for a short exercise.”I posit that it is the
intentionality that is so disquieting – as long as we don’t mean to
separate, as long as it “just happens” that we live segregated lives, we
can maintain a (fragile) identity of racial innocence.